Creating a booklet

I could be wrong, but it sounds like the process that you are trying to achieve manually is known as 'imposition'.

If you pick up a magazine or wire-bound (stapled) booklet, you will see that page 1 is printed on the same leaf as the back page.

A few years ago, designers in DTP always had to worry about producing artwork in 'designer's pairs' and 'printer's pairs'. The 'designer's pairs' were the artwork, the spread as you'd see them in the finished bound work. The 'printer's pairs' were how the pages are actually printed before being trimmed, folded and bound.

If I send a publication to print, I usually send a laser print of the pages as a loosely-bound hard copy. To do this, I have to do what is called 'knocking-up' i.e. flipping each alternate page and stacking it on the pile before punching and binding the completed result.

I'm not sure whether you can achieve the same result without a pretty advanced office laser printer that can print duplex (both sides) in one run.

Of course, you could always try printing odd number pages only, then flipping the pages and putting them back in the carrier and printing even-numbered pages on the reverse sides... all told, it's all a bit clumsy and fussy.

How many pages in your booklet?

I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure you can just bring the file (in page order) to kinkos or whatever and they can do it for you.

So that's 24 pages, right?

The problem is that Word on its own is inadequate when it comes to this sort of stuff.

Here's a diagram to give you an idea how it should be laid out.
The bracketed spreads show the front & back of each leaf.

p.s. This excludes the cover.

a freeware app

There is a freeware application called Cocoa Booklet which prints booklets from pdf files. It's fairly straightforward to set up and use. Can't beat the rhythm of Blue Velvet's direct approach, though.

Very helpful

I use inDesign for this type of task but thank you for mentioning Cocoa Booklet.

Blue Velvet: you're a very cool lady.

Off topic: how many DemiGods, and Mods are there? Have some people been promoted?

JDar said:

There is a freeware application called Cocoa Booklet which prints booklets from pdf files. It's fairly straightforward to set up and use. Can't beat the rhythm of Blue Velvet's direct approach, though.

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Excellent thought! Here's the link.
http://www.iconus.ch/fabien/cocoabooklet/

iSaint, try creating a PDF of your Word file and running it through this.

OT: Balin64, there have been no new demi/contributors since the beginning of January or so when the scheme was closed temporarily. There are some new mods but they were announced about 3-4 months ago...

iSaint said:

I did just that, and it worked wonderfully! Thanks guys and gals!

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Woohoo, congrats iSaint and great job Blue Velvet and JDar